Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Zing! Rachel Maddow Checks Dick Cheney's Record on Terrorists

Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, is a smart political player. She does her homework and makes her arguments based on facts, not fantasy, or, in the case of Dick Cheney, wrong-headed partisan sniping.

Take the case of the so-called Underwear Bomber, whose arrest and confinement has been criticized by numerous Republican leaders, including the former vice president.

Maddow looked at the Bush Administration record and nailed Cheney's hide to the wall:

Dick Cheney from This Week: I think the proper way to deal with [the underpants bomber] would have been to treat him as an enemy combatant.

Rachel Maddow: That would be a lot more convincing if you‘d ever done that yourself when you had the chance. Every single person arrested in this country since 9/11 on terrorism charges has been handled as a civilian criminal, which includes being Mirandized—every single one. The only two outliers are Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, both of whom were in military custody for a while. (During which they didn‘t cooperate with their interrogators, by the way.) But then even they were ultimately handled in the federal criminal system, treated as civilian criminals.